How to hire a development team in Ukraine: Ultimate guide

How to hire a development team in Ukraine: Ultimate guideMarta Hlova

N-iX

2018-09-17T00:00:00+00:002018-09-17T03:20:55+00:00

Today’s blog unveils a step-by-step guide on how to hire a development team in Ukraine. It encompasses a series of articles that are aimed at helping stakeholders, investors, CTOs, and CEOs make a sound decision about an offshore partner. Ukraine is reportedly the most vigorous destination in Easter...

By Marta Hlova
• September 17, 2018

Today’s blog unveils a step-by-step guide on how to hire a development team in Ukraine. It encompasses a series of articles that are aimed at helping stakeholders, investors, CTOs, and CEOs make a sound decision about an offshore partner. Ukraine is reportedly the most vigorous destination in Eastern Europe for setting up an offshore software development team. So this article presents a rigorous roundup of the dynamics of the country’s IT industry.

The guide is based on international and local research, surveys, and reviews. It provides insights about the country’s tech talent pool, business climate, IT industry growth, the biggest IT hubs, leading software development vendors, and more.

Major Findings on IT Outsourcing to Ukraine

In the heyday of digital transformations, companies set off into the outsourcing journey in hope to find a reliable business partner who would help them innovate. Oftentimes, they start by choosing the best country for outsourcing their engineering work. Therefore, they consider such factors the number of qualified engineers in the country, the level of technical education, availability of established vendors, technological expertise, to name a few.

At this point, a lot of companies choose Ukraine for a number of valid reasons. In this guide, we have gathered most of the available data on IT Outsourcing to Ukraine in one place. And now we are set to provide you with the useful tips and tricks that will help you to hire a development team in Ukraine.

Key Highlights

A brief outline of the IT landscape in Ukraine;

Ukraine on the worldwide IT outsourcing scene;

The biggest Ukrainian IT hubs;

Major outsourcing trends prevailing in Ukraine;

The technological skill set of Ukrainian specialists;

Market-leading companies that succeeded by hiring a development team in Ukraine.

1) A brief outline of the Ukrainian IT landscape

In the recent years, many influential sources have placed Ukraine among the top countries for software development outsourcing: the PwC report, the Statista research, the A.T. Kearney research, etc. Last year, Ukraine was named Offshoring Destination of the Year by Global Sourcing Association. This year’s Global Outsourcing 100 list includes 18 Ukraine-based software development companies.

Indeed, this recognition is the result of continuous work that was done by multiple Ukrainian companies during the last few years. The infographic below features key milestones in the development of the Ukrainian IT market:

Sources: Gartner, IT Outsourcing News, DOU, PwC

Tap into the articles we’ve gathered below to have a more in-depth look at the IT business climate in Ukraine.

2) Ukraine on the worldwide IT outsourcing scene

In general terms, there are two major areas where most of the IT outsourcing activity is saturated: Southeast Asia and Central & Eastern Europe. Granted, these are two totally different regions in terms of both business ethics and cultural mindset. While the Ukrainian culture is similar to the Western one, the Asian tradition is far more different from the Western world.

For instance, Indian or Chinese specialists often seek the counsel and direct assistance of other people about both personal and business issues. Although Indian developers are the worldwide leaders in IT outsourcing, they tend to overpromise and this cultural peculiarity often leads to issues and unsatisfied expectations on the projects. Conversely, Ukrainian developers have the Western mindset, so they don’t hesitate to take on responsibility and even suggest alternative ways of product development to deliver the best possible solution.

3) The biggest Ukrainian IT hubs

The Ukrainian tech landscape is shaped by 5 major engineering centers: Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa. This is where most of the country’s talent pool resides. What drives the IT industry in Ukraine is the consolidated initiatives of the local IT clusters. They take a leading role in organizing conferences and workshops, setting up education labs and a variety of training programs to foster the development of the IT industry in Ukraine.

For instance, Lviv IT Cluster in cooperation with local educational institutions is working on building an effective technical education system. In 2018, they launched four more innovative university programs in addition to already existing five that were initiated by the cluster during previous years. As a result, future Ukrainian engineers can master IoT, AI, Machine Learning, Data Science, and other cutting-edge technologies at their universities.

In this respect, Lviv differs from other cities in developing its own unique strategy for developing the IT industry. Local companies have managed to unite to promote the city and collaborate with universities to attract top talent to the local IT sector. Authorities and the local IT community are aligned around the idea to bring Lviv and Ukraine to top positions in global ratings.

4) Software engineering trends prevailing in Ukraine

Ukrainian engineers are early adopters of innovations. They successfully deliver projects involving Big Data, VR, AR, Data Science, Blockchain, and other cutting-edge technologies. Hundreds of IT projects are outsourced to Ukraine from all over the world every year.

Ukrainian programmers accumulate all this knowledge and tech expertise to provide quality services to their clients. Moreover, the growth of all these innovation trends fostered the development of many tech startups in the country, such as PetCube, Grammarly, Senstone, Depositphotos, Template Monster, and others.

Not only does Ukraine offer software development services but also provides professional QA & Testing. In Ukraine, there are almost 2,000 IT service providers, and about 90 % of them provide testing services. The majority of Ukrainian QA specialists are certified and have such recognized software testing certifications as ISTQB, CTFL/CTAL, etc. IT companies in Ukraine encourage their employees to take these tests and often reimburse the fee.

5) Thetechnological skill set of Ukrainian specialists

According to SkillValue, Ukraine ranks 8th among the world’s top countries with the best programmers compared to #34 for India. The average score index for Ukrainian developers is 91.26%. This makes Ukraine an attractive destination for setting up an offshore software development team.

Source: SkillValue

According to DOU survey, Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, and Python are the top-5 programming technologies in Ukraine by market share. With an increasing number of young specialists that graduate from universities each year (about 30,000 IT students), finding the team of engineering professionals in Ukraine is quite easy today.

6) Global businesses that succeeded by hiring a development team in Ukraine

Ukraine hosts a number of R&D centres of market-leading companies, such as Oracle, Samsung, Huawei, IBM, to name a few. Moreover, brands like Skype, Microsoft, LG, WhatsApp, Slack set up offshore development teams in the country. Other examples of successful companies that outsource software development to Ukraine include BBC, BuzzFeed, Reuters, Deutsche Bank, Lebara, Travelport, Currencycloud, and many more.

The takeaways

We hope this research will help you form the complete picture of the Ukrainian IT industry and understand its place in the worldwide tech scene. When it comes to hiring a development team in Ukraine, many businesses struggle with kicking off this process effectively.

The Ukrainian tech industry is evolving rapidly these days. There are a number of IT companies that offer a wide range of services as well as different outsourcing models. And your main task is to figure out which of them meet your business needs.

Summing up, your final choice should undergo three steps. First of all, you should do the research to get acquainted with IT ecosystems of your potential outsourcing destinations, thoroughly evaluating their IT market dynamics and business culture.

Then, you need to compile a list of companies you will thoroughly review in terms of their quality, delivery and security standards as well as their professional competence and potential for success.

Finally, you should weigh all the pros and cons and make a final decision based on reviews, references, and success stories you collect on the particular offshore software development company.

As a rule of thumb, this journey can take a few months or even more. However, if you go through this process step-by-step, chances are you will definitely succeed in setting up an offshore team in Ukraine.

About N-iX

N-iX is an Eastern European provider of software development
services with 900+ expert software engineers onboard that power innovative technology businesses. Since
2002 we have formed strategic partnerships with a variety of global industry leaders
including OpenText, Novell, Lebara, Currency Cloud and over 50 other medium and
large-scale businesses. With delivery centers in Ukraine and Poland, we deliver
excellence in software engineering and deep expertise in a range of verticals
including finance, healthcare, hospitality, telecom, energy and enterprise content
management helping our clients to innovate and implement technology
transformations.